Me Time ✨ Gratitude In The Moment

Hey, Sunday, happy, happy day Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, just a happy day. My name is Jean Nicholls. I'm here chatting about me time and I am on my trusted bike today, finding gratitude. Hey, Andi. Mac. I'm actually riding my real bike today out here. Actually headed home. Taught a spin class this morning and my car, the alternator is going out, so it stalls, so it's unsafe for me to drive. So instead I'm opting into my road bike. And here's what's great. I love riding my bike. I love it. It's probably why I teach spin classes, but I love the freedom of being out of my bike.

So it's been a fascinating couple weeks and. Ooh, nice. We'll have to go for a ride sometime. In the honor of finding gratitude in the moment. Hello, hello. Hey, everybody. How's it going? Happy Sunday. Nice to have you join in. Before we get started, I'm just gonna invite you all to do a few things. One, if you're not driving a car and you're not actually riding a bicycle, I am going to invite you to type in the chat one thing in this moment that you're grateful for. Just one thing. First thing that comes to mind.

So my thing is that I'm grateful that my car broke down. I know that sounds really silly. I'm not grateful for how it happened. It's gradually been stalling over a period of time. And a few weeks ago, before I went to go teach a class at 6am, my car didn't start. So I wasn't really happy in that moment. But I'm grateful that my car broke down because I haven't been riding my bike enough this summer for sure. Last summer also, and I actually had two of my bikes stolen in the last three or four years.

And so I just kind of lost my steam. But I'm grateful that my car broke down because that means that I've been biking to and from almost everything. And I love it. I literally am so joyful. Except the fact that I had to pull off to the side of the road to do my live stream and I'm hoping that the car traffic isn't too loud. So we're grateful for your friend Sarah, for the sunshine to be here. Yeah, so many things. So I've been doing this thing, and if you're new to me, my name is Jean. I often times have my coworker with me.

His name is Major, he's a golden retriever, but I can't fit him on my bike. He's a big Dog. He's a big dog. But today, on Me Time, it's always about personal discoveries and personal insights and finding a connection with ourselves. And today in particular, I feel like it's kind of apropos to try to find some gratitude. So I live in Minneapolis. Our spin studio is in uptown Minneapolis. And if you aren't from Minnesota and you've been reading the news, there's been a lot happening this week in Minnesota and Minneapolis in particular.

It's been a hard week. We have people that write at our studio whose families have been impacted by a tragedy. Our team feels a little out of sorts. I feel a little out of sorts. We all want to try to do something to make a difference for the future because we can't change the past. So it feels appropriate that today I find space to have gratitude. And we have a conversation around gratitude. Now, when I say finding time for gratitude in the moment, what does that mean to you? Does that feel good?

Does it feel aloof? Does it feel out of reach? Does it feel necessary or valued? What does it feel like when you hear the word gratitude? When I was talking to a mom yesterday whose son was in the school where the tragedy occurred in Minneapolis, I held her for a really long time and gave her a really big hug. And I was grateful to be able to hold space for her in that moment. And what happened next was I just looked at her and I said, what do you need right now? And she said, you know what I don't need?

And I was like, that's perfect. What don't you need right now? She said, I don't need a bunch of people telling me that I should feel grateful right now. And I paused, and I was like, say more. Just tell me more. And she said, it's not that I don't feel grateful that I get to hug my sons. It's I'm angry, I'm mad. I feel all these other emotions instead, and I'm not ready to feel grateful yet. And that doesn't mean that I'm not happy that I get to hug my sons or any of those things. And I was like, that's really fair.

And nobody gets to tell you how you get to feel in any particular moment. And so I thought that it was really honest and raw. So there might be days where finding something that brings you joy or finding something that makes you grateful can be really, really hard. Now, there are science, there are studies, and I am a geek, so I can send you studies if you want to see them, but there are studies that show that when you can find a little bit of gratitude in your day, it actually starts to help change some of how our brain functions and works.

It starts to shift neurons in our brain, similar to meditation or sound bath meditations. So gratitude can be something that might feel aloof, but it also is grounded in science. And really what that science is about is perspectives, right? So what we think we can create, so the energy that we feel, we can sit in, or we can shift it and adjust it and create something different. We do have that power. However, there will be days where energetically and emotionally we don't feel it. And here's what's great, that is okay.

We do not have to feel joyful, giddy, happy, silly, goofy, all of those things every single day. We don't have to do any of that. We get to just be ourselves. So gratitude in the moment for me. Sorry, I feel like I'm getting eaten up by bugs. Gratitude in the moment for me is really, really about taking a pause, Finding space in my body, finding space in my mind, finding a pause in all of it to check in with where I'm at right now, this moment, and to simply remember that sometimes, as hard as a challenge might be, look how far we've come.

So it's interesting because when I teach a lot of classes, I get to coach a lot of people to do something that maybe they don't feel like they can do that day. And at the end of class, I often hear, I didn't have it in me when I walked through that door, but wow, I just had my best ride. And I'm not always going for best ride. But I'm gonna pause for a second because there's a cern. I'm not sure how loud that was for you. Hopefully not too loud. I have the ears in today, so hopefully not too loud.

But my point is, is that we always don't feel it, but when we look at behind us, look in the rearview mirror, look at the challenges that are behind us, that we woke up in the morning and we said, I don't think I have it in me today, and then you did the thing. So gratitude in the moment for me is about just recognizing, in this moment, I'm alive. In this moment, I am touching a tree, and I can be grateful for the earth that supports me in this moment. I can see the beauty in the sky because it's a blue sky day.

I can feel a fresh breath, and I can feel grateful that I have access to a bike. So when my car dies And I don't have a car for a few weeks. I can feel strong enough in my body that I can get on my bike and I can ride to where I need to be. So gratitude can just simply be a state of acknowledgement of where you're at in this moment and recognizing how far you've come from the moments behind you, and I'm looking literally behind me how far we've come. Great. So when I ask the question one more time, what are you grateful for in this moment?

What might be one more thing about yourself that you can feel gratitude for? I'm grateful that I have a strong enough body that I can bike. Not everybody gets to do that. And someday I might not be able to. But what I can control is the moment that I'm in. The thoughts that I have right now can't control what happened a day ago. I can't control what's going to happen an hour from now. But I can be right here in this moment and holding space in this moment for the things that I can control and be grateful for that, especially in a time where everything seems to be turned upside down.

I'm grateful for my team at our Cycle Bar studio, and I lead the instructor team, and I'm grateful for them because each one of them has been able to encounter their own feelings around what's happened in our city this week. And they've held space for hundreds of people to move through emotion. And I'm grateful that when they need to say, I don't have it in me today, that they can raise their hand and somebody else will help lift them up. That's all that we can do, right? We can raise our hand and say that we're in or out today.

We can find gratitude in our bodies, in our breath and our ability to breathe. We can choose all kinds of things. So today I'm on a journey of gratitude. And for the last 38 days, I've been doing a daily ceremony of cacao, which, if you don't know what cacao is, I'm going to actually do a live video on it, because people keep asking. It's a dark chocolate. It's a deep, deep, deep, dark chocolate. It is bitter. So if you're not used to, will taste bitter, not sweet. But it's a ceremony. It's an ancient, ancient ritual where people come together in ceremony and they come from a place to open up their heart space, to receive and to give and to offer.

And oftentimes people will do gratitude in that little ceremony. So every day for 38 days, I've been practicing gratitude with a mug that reminds me of my dad because I lost my dad. And I'm grateful for the fact that I get to help him live on in me and through me and the work that I do. And I'm grateful for my mom. Same thing, the work that she's done. So finding little pockets of time to just find, even on the hard days, something that maybe you're grateful for can just start to shift. Some of the things in our brain can start to open up our heart so that we can receive a little bit more love.

Not from everybody outside, just love from ourselves. So today, I hope you get outside. Andy, get on your bike, send me a note. Let's go ride sometime. And I hope you all have a really nice rest of your day. If you're in Minnesota, head out to the fair. If you have any favorite state fair foods, send me a note. I'm on Instagram. Dream big 30. I'm curating my list and the first thing on my list is hot honey pizza or hot honey ball. I don't know. Basically, it's like a pepperoni cheese ball that has honey.

They said pepperoni and honey. I'm in. I hope you have a good day. Celebrate you today, and we'll see you soon.